


I'll Meet You After Eight

by sarcat



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcat/pseuds/sarcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being with someone is much worse when you aren’t with them at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Meet You After Eight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mumblingmaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblingmaria/gifts).



> So if you aren’t aware, I am a horrible person and I am generally super late with all birthday gifts. I am honestly surprised I don’t owe you two birthday gifts at this point. And lucky you, this is my first attempt at an MG fic. To my darling Maria. I know your birthday is long gone, but I still send this fic to you with much love and birthday cake. I listened to Gwen's mix of course and it helped me every time I hit a road block. So hopefully it's not as horrible as I dreamed it up to be. Also, this is payback if I did it right.

**001.**

This is as close to normal as she’ll ever get, so she stays in it. She lets the fuzzy comfort of a memory in  _her_  bed keep her here, listens as it blooms into shallow calls for her to hurry for breakfast.

But she doesn’t.

She had always preferred a slicker entrance into the kitchen, grabbing slightly burnt toast straight from the toaster and smothering it with two pads of butter then with some jam. Then there would always be a bowl of melon. Her mother had been on some kind of health kick, so she allows it even if it’s not exactly sweetly ripe yet.

The sun during the first week of fall always hits the crook of her arm whenever she decided to sit next to her father. And like always, he’s eagerly taking in black printed letters from the morning paper, brows arcing whenever something caught his attention. It was always what he would do afterwards that she valued the most. His eyes would hover over the top of the paper, and he would sit there until she acknowledged him fully with buttery jam smeared at the corners of her lips.

_Wait till you hear this!_

And she’s memorized this routine. She wakes up to this routine even when it’s just her now, and she’s staring up at a ceiling that is not her own anymore.

Oh, yeah, she wasn’t there. And they are gone again just like most mornings now.

Her eyes start letting the fluorescent light filter in, mind almost refusing to let her focus on any one thing straight away. She’s warm and it kind of feels like home. Her stomach churns.

“Hey…”

It gets a little louder with each pitch to her ear.

“Come on, Casey.”

Her lips twitch and she forces her eyes shut once more to slow her release from her dreams. She can still hear Hunter, feel him kneading her shoulder with another plea.

“What?” she finally responds past the thick lump in her throat. She prays she wasn’t crying and that feeling intensifies the longer she maintains contact with the cold linoleum tiles, fingers groping to get a better sense of her surroundings.

“Casey!”

Even with her eyes closed she can feel the smile that has slid onto his face, bright green eyes alert, ears perked up with an eagerness to get closer. He’s always like that.

“What happened?” she asks slowly.

She tests the waters, slowly rolling her head from side to side. Hunter must have slid his sweater underneath her head. It’s pretty soft for something so thin looking around his too small shoulders, but it has this distinct smell of something new regardless of the number of times he’s washed it. She breathes it in long and deep when her head dips to the left and she sees his khaki clad knees.

His hovering hands immediately recoil, resting on his thighs as he hunches his shoulders forward. He looks right and left before giving his full attention back to her.

“They didn’t like your answer,” he whispers.

It takes her a minute to wrap her head around his answer, to remember being up at the blackboard scraping the correct theorem onto its surface with a piece of chalk.

She doesn’t even care how woozy it makes her feel. She just shoots straight up with mussed up curls, a few stray strands hanging on her lashes. “It was the right answer.”

Hunter leans back, but it does nothing to smooth the hunch of his shoulders. “It wasn’t their answer.”

Casey draws up her knees, swinging them to her side as she makes a grab for her head that throbs pretty bad.

“Taser,” she hears him mutter as he collects his sweater from the ground, “Better tasers, I don’t know, you went down so quick.”

They’ve managed to huddle closer, heads hidden by the tops of desks that don’t have a single glob of gum beneath them. His palms are open on top of his knees, but something flickers between his eyes. Worry, anger, guilt? She’s not sure which it is, but his fingers curl in on themselves until his hands are unforgiving fists. His face is still neutral, soft, and before she even knows it his hands are bare, fists gone.  

“I’m fine,” she assures no one. Saying it almost makes her feel the same jolt that shook her to the ground.

“Yeah,” Hunter agrees quietly, “Yeah.”

She clumsily finds his knee instead of his hands, thumb rubbing with a concentrated calmness. She peals away as soon as she realizes what she’s done; more concerned about what she feels when she sees his warm cheeks and the small smile that runs as soon as she notices. It’s not rushed Monday mornings with jam on her face and a grin that stretches to her ears when her dad says something witty or the smell of coffee that wafts from her mom’s mug just as she walks by, halting the urge to kiss her daughter’s forehead because she’s gotten too old for that now. But the comfort is there, the safety making her relax much more than she allows herself to when wandering these halls.

“Thanks.”

He looks confused right away, but it’s obvious with how his lips start to relax from the tight line they had found themselves in that he’s nothing but grateful to hear something that nice.

_He kind of feels like home._

**002.**

“I don’t think it’s impossible.” It doesn’t sound convincing. It actually sounds even weaker when he brings his hand up to rest behind his neck. He rubs the spot there a few times before stopping and peering at her from behind strands of deeply red hair.

“It really doesn’t matte—“ Her voice dies off as soon as his elbow drops a little lower, eyes flitting back and forth to avoid her gaze. “Hunter, I…”

“No, no! Don’t even, don’t even worry. I’m not upset,” he says while his hands shoot up defensively, “Really.”

Casey keeps her distance, hugging her arms just as she presses her hips into the wall. One unscuffed Oxford heel touches the wall behind her to support her weight and she’s automatically back to business.

“Hunter, you called me all the way to the opposite side of campus just to tell me that you don’t think it’s impossible to escape?” She doesn’t even bother lowering her voice in the event they can hear her or anything. The idea has just gotten that incredulous to her after all this time and it's probably that incredulous to the faculty. They were in too deep, too messed up to really get out now.

Hunter waves his hands in front of him in a hurry to dismiss any idea forming in her head. “Just hear me out, okay?”

Casey just sighs in compliance, wind whipping a few of her curls past her shoulders. “Go ahead.”

He steps forward, not wasting a second with uncertainty. “I have to take you on a date.”

Casey pinches the bridge of her nose. She lets out another sigh like they’ve danced around this topic a million times when they’ve only ever dealt with it once in her room with Jade watching them both carefully in only a towel.  _Embarrassing_.

“Wait! I know you’re going to say something, and I’m sure it’s great, but let me just finish,” he pleads.

She looks as if she’s going to say something profound, turn on her heel and leave, but she presses herself back into the wall with cool attentive eyes roving over his face. He stays quiet a moment too long in astonishment almost missing her clear her throat, raising a waiting hand. 

“Well?”

“Right!” he practically yelps. His hand drops to his side, weighed down by the watch strapped to his wrist. And he has to rock forward onto the balls of his feet and swing back until he can get the rest out.

“This place isn’t forever. Not most places are. We’ll probably figure it all out sooner or later,” he shoots out quickly, a mountain of books he still needs to read through still engraved in his mind, “And if it’s sooner I want to be there with you…”

“Hunter…”

He holds up his hand to her.

“Casey, whatever either of us plans, we need to do it together. I don’t think I could live with myself if you end up doing something and I could have been there somewhere along the way to help make it easier. Please let me make anything easier.”

Casey melds her lips together, eyes clenched shut. He thinks it’s probably sign enough to retreat and reclaim whatever is left of his dignity, but she opens her eyes and sees straight into him and that scares him into stillness.

“Okay,” she promises out loud.

He’s never been more relieved in his life.  

**003.**

This kiss doesn’t count. Not much counts in his life. He’s okay with that. He’s okay with most things.

His hands push at her hips until she’s pressed against his desk, and he must have not messed up too badly if her hands have found themselves threaded in his hair. He lingers above her lips again, forehead pressed securely against hers, so he can breathe. And he just sucks it in slowly as he leans forwards, nose touching hers.

“Is this okay?” It’s all he cares too ask right now.

She looks almost as sure as he does, which isn’t a lot. It has nothing to do with experience. He knows it immediately when her hands find his collar and she’s breathing with more control at the top of his lip.

“Might not matter tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Of course that’s not all he can say to that noise. So he says a couple of things instead with his lips over hers, thumbs just grazing a tease of warmth under her sweater and onto her skin. And he’ll say it a couple of more times lightly past her jaw as she moans something unintelligible, then once on her forehead before he leaves.

**004.**

She gets louder.

“It was fucking you. Of course it was fucking you!”

She can’t stop her hands as each word becomes its own poignant sentence. They’re just shaking and they can’t stop the bleeding. She raises bloodied fists above the top of her singed hair, arching her back only to swing her whole body forward until she’s heaving a dry wail over the tops of her knees.

She’s not crying. She’s just angry, so angry that her entire body moves in the roar that she makes. And she can’t convince herself to stop.

“It’s not working,” Jade tells her like it’s going to make her come back all of a sudden and find a way to save the day. That’s what’s expected. But there aren’t plans for situations like this. And with any calculation you have to factor in a casualty.

It doesn’t make it bearable.

_Find Andy, will yea? I wanted to give him a few more comics before I left, but I wasn’t finished with them. He’ll like them, wow, no, he’ll love them. They’re under my mattress cause I was worried Ike would find them and pawn them off for money._

“Jade, stop. Just stop, okay? He’s gone.”

There. She said it. It takes ten minutes of a blank stare to finally tell Jade to stop. He’s not coming back. He can’t come back from this.

Her stomach dips down before flopping up, and the only thing that keeps her from throwing up is the cool ground beneath her forehead.

_I knew you were wrong._

She can still see how tired he looked when he had said it, how dark the circles under his eyes had been. No amount of yelling on her part could stop him from spending the last of his energy on her.

The blood. There was too much of it on him, a jagged slash to his chest that wasn’t meant for anyone except her. Hunter had pushed her out of the way because that was the Hunter kind of thing to do, and that was who he was. And he believed in her. He said that he believed she could make it out of here alive. Makes sense. It makes sense to anyone except her and her knotted fingers behind her neck.

_But then again I didn’t need a bump on the head from you to tell me that we could be a thing. I just kind of knew._

**005.**

Hunter’s always first. “Hey.”

The small wall that comes up to his hips is the only thing that’s separating them. Okay, that’s a lie. Just about everything in this institution stands between them much higher than a bloody wall like this does.

“Hey,” Casey says just as she reaches the wall with four bountiful strides. She leans forward on her elbows, and her eyes are as clear as the skies.

“How about that date?” he asks, resting his chin in his propped up hand. And she could say no a million times, but to him it sounds as beautiful as a  _yeah, let’s go to the Bloor._  

“How about not this time?” she says, but she’s breathing a laugh out like it’s not the first or the last.

“Sounds good. I’ll meet you after eight.”


End file.
